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4 August 2011 Jems: Journal of Experimental Music Studies — Reprint Series Following a Straight Line: La Monte Young Dave Smith Originally published in Contact no. 18 (Winter 1977-78), pp. 4-9. The following article has been amended and essential facts updated with the full support and assistance of La Monte Young especially for this Jems Reprint. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author. Jems original upload date: 21 June 2004. Through the few pieces of his I’ve heard, I’ve had. utterly different experiences of listening than I’ve had with any other music [John Cage].1 I am wildly interested in repetition, because I think it demonstrates control [La Monte Young].2 He really goes to great lengths to control as much as possible, and to focus the attention on what remains uncontrolled [George Brecht].3 It’s not a question of ‘there’s so little to hear’: there’s so much to hear [Howard Skempton].4 La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 No. 7 consists of two notes, B and F# at the bottom of the treble clef, written as semibreves with ties: this notation is accompanied by the instruction ‘to be held for a long time’. Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F. (April 1960), popularly known as X for Henry Flynt, requires the performer to repeat a loud, heavy sound every one to two seconds as uniformly and as regularly as possible for a long period of time.5 The important words here are ‘repeat’, ‘held’ and ‘for a long time’. (In 1963 Young organised a five-hour performance of the open fifth piece.) Performing, or witnessing a single activity extended in time, we begin to appreciate aspects and ideas that would otherwise remain hidden. In the open fifth piece we hear pitches additional to those notated: combination tones appear singly or in small groups. The mind constantly refocuses as the listener’s attention is drawn by different elements and transformations of the sound. And the acoustics of an enclosed performance space ensure varied perceptions in different parts of the room. The superhuman demands of X for Henry Flynt require total concentration on the part of the performer and a commitment to do the best job he can:6 ultimately a mentally rewarding experience. But what of the audience? Cornelius Cardew wrote that the interest of the piece lies in (1) Its duration, and proportional to that: (2) the variation within the uniform repetition. 1 Smith, Following a Straight Line: La Monte Young (3) the stress imposed on the single performer and through him on the audience... These elements occur rather in spite of the instructions, although naturally they are the result of them. What the listener can hear and appreciate are the errors in the interpretation. If the piece were performed by a machine this interest would disappear and with it the composition.7 Composition 1960 No. 7 emphasises the harmonic series through the purity and reduction of material and points to Young's later work with precisely-tuned sinewave drones and voices. On the other hand, X for Henry Flynt is most often realised in the form of forearm clusters on a piano. The composer was reported to have performed it by driving a hammer into a bucketful of nails amplified with a contact microphone, or by beating a large frying-pan with a wooden spoon:8 in other words, using sounds traditionally regarded as of indefinite pitch. (Young's music, however, negates the existence of indefinite pitch.) These two pieces bear a fundamental relationship to all of his output (and indeed to much English and American experimental music of the last ten years). Young started working with long sounds in 19579 (in the octet for Brass) but his interest in them dates from much earlier. He remembers the sound of the wind in the chinks of the Idaho log cabin in which he was born in 1935. In his childhood he was fascinated by continuous environmental sounds, particularly those of motors, power plants and telephone poles. The ‘dream chord’ (made up of the pitches G-C-C sharp-D) on which some of his pieces are based is the chord he used to hear in the telephone poles.10 The Trio for Strings (1958) is based entirely on different spacings and transpositions of selected pitches (usually three at any one time) from the ‘dream chord’. The opening is given in Example 1. Example 1: Opening, Trio for Strings My timings are approximate since they are taken down from a recording, but the overlapping of notes in time seems to be carefully structured throughout the work as does the order of pitches (which is related to twelve-note procedures). But these are incidental aspects. What is more noticeable is that the 48-minute Trio is played entirely without vibrato, mostly pretty quietly and with very slow bowing. The sculptural qualities of the sound are reinforced in performance by the statuesque appearance of the players. The timbres are devoid of colour and the notes are played not ‘as individual “parts” but as contributions to a chordal unit whose components are of different durations’.11 These chordal units are separated by silences lasting up to 40 seconds. Young was probably not aware of the early works of Christian Wolff which explore similar territory. The only pitches in Wolff's Trio for flute, clarinet and violin (1951) are two superimposed perfect fifths (E-B-F sharp), and the Duo for violins (1950) uses two adjacent semitones (D-E flat-E). Wolff's desire was to create as much diversity as possible within the severe pitch limitations he had imposed, e.g. through varying combinations of instruments, dynamics etc. Like Young’s Trio, the Duo is slow, mostly quiet and played without vibrato. There is a similar emphasis on harmony at the expense of melody; another of Wolff ’s works that is interesting in this respect is For Piano 1 (1952) in which nine widely-spaced pitches are arranged in ‘constellations’ of sound separated by up to 18 seconds of silence. Significantly, both Wolff and Young relate their early work to Webern, drawing attention to that composer’s habit of repeating pitches only at the same octave placement for a section of a work. A European composer might understand this as a means of maintaining and increasing tension (e.g. see Jean Barraqué’s remarkable Piano Sonata of 1950–52). The two Americans found that for them it created stasis. Young spent most of the 40s and 50s in Los Angeles where he received his education.12 Some of his early musical ambitions lay in jazz (he had been playing saxophone since the age of six or seven) and he played regularly with, among others, Billy Higgins and Don Cherry. At the same time, he was studying at Los Angeles City College with Leonard Stein, Schoenberg’s assistant, and eventually decided to devote himself more to ‘serious composition’, although to this day he holds an exceptional regard for such jazzmen as Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. 2 Smith, Following a Straight Line: La Monte Young But the late 50s was a time of discovery for Young and he was deeply impressed by the drone-dominated liturgical chant, Gagaku and Indian classical music that he heard. Then in 1959 he attended Stockhausen’s composition course in Darmstadt where, ironically enough, he discovered Cage’s indeterminate music. The results of this experience were immediate. Vision (1959) is a work for eleven instrumentalists spread around a darkened auditorium. Eleven sounds (or complexes of sounds) are heard in 13 minutes. The duration and spacing of these sounds are calculated by the performance director with the aid of a random number book or telephone directory. Unusually, the sounds are not constant but ‘complex and changing’. Poem (1960) is scored for chairs, tables, benches or anything else that can be dragged across a floor. Again, random numbers are used by the performance director, this time to determine the number of events, their durations, the points at which they begin and end and the length of the composition. The composer specifies that the sounds should be as constant and as continuous as possible, but ‘what is actually perceived is the uncontrolled and unintended deviation which arises from the impossible attempt to achieve a constant sound’ (Michael Parsons),13 a clear relationship with X for Henry Flynt. Parsons goes on to point out that ‘sounds of the kind specified in Poem, sometimes regarded as an affront to the ear, can actually be quite beautiful if one concentrates on listening to them’. Certainly the sounds can at first seem offensive and objectionable. But after a time ‘the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking further offense, and a very strange, euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begin to set in.... After a while the euphoria...begins to intensify. By the time the piece is over, the silence is absolutely numbing, so much of an environment has the piece become’ (Dick Higgins).14 Young tests this theory even further in 2 Sounds (1960), which dates from a period of close collaboration with Terry Riley. One sound is made by scraping a tin can over a pane of glass, the other by scraping a drum stick around a gong: both tin and gong were close-miked. The sounds were recorded on separate tapes which are started at different times. Merce Cunningham has been using this version for his ‘Winterbranch’ ballet since 1964. In 1960 Young won a travelling scholarship enabling him to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield in New York (where he has lived ever since).
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